loria] SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY—A REVIEW 295
repeats, was due to the extinction of the upper Latin classes and to the exhaustion of the rural class that ought to have replaced them; and that this decay of the Italian population rendered it an easy prey to the strong race from beyond the mountains. But how came it about that, simultaneously with the dissolution of Roman society, the relations of production, which it had developed, were dissolved? How came it about that on the ruins of these there arose a system of economic relations totally different not only from the Roman system but also from that previously existing among the German conquerors? That these phenomena cannot be attributed to the action of the anthropologic factor is shown by the not infrequent examples in history, of entire nations subjugated and destroyed, while no innovation in the relations of property arose from such disaster. More than this, history presents numerous examples of social revolutions accomplished without any accompanying ethnical extinction or revolution, the greatest example being the grand revolution that placed the bourgeois class in power, a revolution accomplished everywhere without being accompanied by any extinction or mutation of race.
Now, all this proves clearly that the cause of social revolution lies not in a change of man or in the anthropologic factor, but in a change of things, or in the economic factor. It is the internal transformation of the relations of wealth production, or, to ascend to its first cause, of the relations between the population and the earth, that constitutes the fundamental factor from which flow, by a natural necessity, the great historical changes in society—in its organic constitution. If Ammon does not understand this, if he is pleased to treat economic phenomena with disdain, if he considers them as a secondary, nay, as a disturbing (!), element of social evolution, it can be explained only by the author's incredible ignorance of political economy, which he appears to have derived solely from the superficial, biased, and partisan publications of Professor Julius Wolf. Sombart pointed out not long ago, and
